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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 8:2 2003
© 2003 Oxford University Press

Empirical Article

The Effect of Irrelevant Visual Input on Working Memory for Sign Language

Margaret Wilson

University of California, Santa Cruz

Karen Emmorey

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies

We report results showing that working memory for American Sign Language (ASL) is sensitive to irrelevant signed input (and other structured visual input) in a manner similar to the effects of irrelevant auditory input on working memory for speech. Deaf signers were disrupted on serial recall of lists of ASL signs when either pseudosigns or moving shapes were presented during a retention interval. Hearing subjects asked to recall lists of printed English words did not show disruption under the same interference conditions. The results favor models that hypothesize modality-specific representations of language within working memory, as opposed to amodal representations. The results further indicate that working memory for sign language involves visual or quasi-visual representations, suggesting parallels to visuospatial working memory.

This work was supported by NIH grant DC-00128-01 awarded to Margaret Wilson and NIH grant HD-13249 and NSF grant SBR-9809002 awarded to Karen Emmorey. We thank Brenda Falgier and Kevin Clark for help in developing stimuli and running subjects. We thank Dennis Galvan for his help in recruiting subjects. We are especially grateful to Gallaudet University, Washington, DC, California State University, Northridge, and the Deaf subjects who participated in these studies. Correspondence should be sent to Margaret Wilson, Department of Psychology, Social Sciences 2, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 (e-mail: mlwilson{at}cats.ucsc.edu

Received April 13, 2001; revised November 30, 2001; accepted December 6, 2001


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